Law & Disorder —

Burn, media, burn! Why we destroy comics, disco records, and TVs

Americans love their media, but they also love to bash it—and burn it.

Burn the disco down

Thirty years later, in a very different neck of the woods, white hot rage was directed not against comics, but disco. As Alice Echols points out in her engaging book Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, by 1979 disco was getting it from all sides. Anti-gay rights activist Anita Bryant darkly warned, for example, that homosexuals were cranking out disco singles "with double meanings . . . then having ‘straight' children buy them." More genteel types insisted that the genre represented an unhealthy commercialization or trivialization of American music.

But the most active disco despisers were album-oriented rock stations and their fans. These included "Dennis Erectus" of KOME in San Jose, California, who played 33 rpm disco records at 78 rpm while mixing in the sounds of flushing toilets and people vomiting. Add Detroit station WWWW to the mix, two of whose deejays launched the "Disco Ducks Klan."

"They were laying plans, which were later aborted, to wear white sheets onstage at a disco that was switching to rock," Echols writes. Although that scheme never came to fruition, the duo did simulate live "electrocutions" of disco fans, their names and telephone numbers provided by members of the "intelligence" wing of DREAM (Detroit Rockers Engaged in the Abolition of Disco).

These activities presaged that great moment in the history of anti-disco fever: Disco Demolition Night, held on July 12, 1979 in Comiskey Park, Chicago. The discophobe in charge of this remarkable event was DJ Steve Dahl of WLUP in Chicago, who sought to organize, in his words, an "anti-disco army... dedicated to the eradication of the dreaded musical disease."

Dahl often lisped when saying the d-word; it was one of his kinder gestures. "When Van McCoy, of the hit single 'The Hustle,' died, Dahl memorialized him by destroying his record on the air," Echols notes.

DD Night had a specific objective—fans would come to the stadium and trash disco records. Those who arrived with the content in question would be admitted for 98 cents. The legendary event took place during a contest between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers.

"That evening over 70,000 people descended upon the ballpark," Echols writes. "So many Dahlites showed up with records—reportedly 10,000—that regular ticket holders were denied admission."

During the intermission, Dahl, who was decked out in military fatigues and an army helmet, drove onto the field in a military-style jeep. Next to him sat a blond bombshell, a model named Lorelei who often appeared in WLUP's ads. Then an enormous crate filled with what was said to be 50,000 disco records was placed in center field. After setting off fireworks in front of the crate, Dahl detonated a fireworks bomb inside the crate that sent shards of the exploded records flying.

This provoked a half hour riot, with 7,000 fans prancing about the field of combat in an orgy of record smashing. Eventually the tactical division of the Chicago Police Department was called in. They arrested 39 people. Several were injured in the melee.

Disco Demolition Night, 1979

Was this a spontaneous act of anti-disco combustion, or part of a coordinated campaign? Echols points out that AOR's war on disco was no accident. Two radio consultants discovered that these strange jihads boosted listenership and station loyalty, even among listeners who were initially neutral about disco. After conducting some audience research, they managed to convince no less than sixty radio stations to "appeal to their base by launching anti-disco campaigns."

But given the raunchy, rude nature of this movement, it's hard to reduce anti-disco to a "moral panic." Perhaps an "a-moral" panic would be better—the anxieties of old school rockers confronting a mainstream popular culture now dominated by sexually and ethnically complicated figures like Prince, Sylvester, and Michael Jackson. As Echols notes, in the disco era, a scruffy straight white rocker resented the expectation that he had to dress better at clubs.

"You have to look good," Dahl complained to an interviewer, "you know, tuck your shirt in, perfect this, perfect that." Horrors. To the alarm of the sixties generation, the times were once again a changin', which brings us back to television.

We're in trouble

Can you imagine a book titled Four Arguments for the Elimination of Radio, or Four Arguments for the Elimination of Magazines, or Four Arguments for the Elimination of the Telephone? It's difficult to conjure up such a tome. But Jerry Mander's 1978 polemic Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television is a must-read item in any serious media criticism library.

In Four Arguments, Mander categorically rejected the notion that television could be reformed with better programming. Television sets "organize society in a certain way," he warned.

They give power to a very small number of people to speak into the brains of everyone else in the system night after night after night with images that make people turn out in a certain kind of way. It affects the psychology of people who watch. It increases the passivity of people who watch. It changes family relationships. It changes understandings of nature. It flattens perception so that information, which you need a fair amount of complexity to understand it as you would get from reading, this information is flattened down to a very reduced form on television. And the medium has inherent qualities which cause it to be that way.

You didn't have to read Mander to learn this, of course. "We're in a lot of trouble!" screamed Howard Beale at a live studio audience in Paddy Chayefsky's legendary 1976 movie Network. Why? "Because less than 15 percent of you read books! Because less than 15 percent of you read newspapers! Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube! [And] who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network?"

No surprise that a generation of media activists responded to these dark, McCluhanesque visions with a single battle cry—Kill Your Television! Most of this "killing" boiled down to boycotts—national days or (for the more ambitious) weeks without television, usually promoted by various educational groups. But the anti-TV movement has always been accompanied by a violent performance art tradition that, ironically, is now well documented on YouTube.

Kill your television!

Consider one of the "top comments" on the above YouTube masterpiece. "Dude, it feels so good seeing those TVs getting smashed," the commenter declares. "Television makes me sick to my stomach. It's a propaganda and brainwashing tool."

What do all these smashing, burning, and bombing activities have in common with each other? I see a continuum in all this demolition—a sense that there will be no justice or peace until we torch the awful stuff in question. And let's face it, media bashing is way too much fun to leave to comics haters and prudes. That's why so many of us have done it, or vicariously enjoyed it, at one point or another in our lives.

"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more!" Network's Howard Beale wants us to shout from our bedroom windows. But how are we to do that? By voting? A letter to the editor?

Sometimes throwing the nearest portable electronic device across the room is the most satisfying way to start.

Matthew Lasar
Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Emailmatthew.lasar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@matthewlasar